Python/Ubuntu Love

My current financial situation has cause quite an uprooting of my normal daily schedule. The past week as gone like so:
Mon-Tue: Sick. Diarrhea. Gross, I know. Spent most of my time between the back porch for fresh air and the bathroom.
Wed-Thur: Not much at all. Spent alot of hours in front of my desktop playing Final Fantasy 7 for the sake of mind-numbing nostalgia.
Fri-Present: Friday I borrowed my dad's laptop after spending several hours at his office reading Eric Lippert's blog. Took it home, popped in Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, and decided I needed to learn Python.

Learning Linux has been quite an adventure for me. Ubuntu's mantra of being "Linux for human beings" is quite appropriate. I would like to consider myself a well seasoned geek, but after spending several hours with Knoppix at ECTC, the difference in usability (at least for me) is quite dramatic. Simple, streamlined interface. Help all over. Just great stuff.
At first I was somewhat skeptical about the limited collection of apps it ships with--Knoppix as a stand-alone LiveCD has just about everthing you can imagine--but I soon learned how easy it is, given a reliable internet connection, to just drop in just about anything you need.
One rule of thumb I stick to, though: If you can't get it through a package manager, stay away. Unless you're a developer like me and have to go through subversion and the like for the necessary libraries for developing on Linux, that seems to be pretty much a universal truth.

One note, though, that I find rather odd is that I still have trouble installing simple things like Flash and Java. One of my first goals when I booted up the system was, like most users, customize my browser to my liking. Firefox, of course is totally stable on this build, but does not ship with plugins for Flash or Java. Why this decision was made by Canonical is far from me to determine, but again, the "Linux for humans" slogan loses a bit of it's appeal when simple things like this are skipped. I can only hope this problem is remedied by the 8.04 "Hardy Heron" release this month.

As far as the Python pursuit goes, at the moment it's slow-going. Like with most langauges, I have a hard time learning it without some sort of goal in mind. I've got one, a GUI front end for GCC, but that requires a GUI designer. With that said, I think I may have fount my IDE of choice for the time being: SPE. It's UI is similar to that of Eclipse and Visual Studio, but does not include a UI desiger. For that I suppose I would be willing to learn wxGlade, which is apparently the UI Designer required for this product. The lack of a UI component of a base library for a language is something that is foreign to me, given my experience in .NET.

All in all, a rather boring, but mostly productive week.

EDIT: I just learned from the Ubuntu beta page that the CFS has officially been added to the 2.6.24-12.13 kernel. If I wasn't limited to the 250 some-odd Mb of swap file space, I would download the beta now.